On Sat, Nov 17, 2001 at 04:34:51PM -0800, Erik Steffl <steffl@bigfoot.com> was heard to say:
> > No. It means "there are to few packages fitting in here to add a new
> > class".
>
> that's not a reason not to have a class. why would a class would have
> to have certain number of packages? If it's distinct enough there should
> be a class for it. e.g. if we suddenly get a new ui type there might be
> only handlful (or none!) programs using it, e.g. for berlin. that does
> not mean there should not be a category for it.
The problem with this is that then we move from having a confusingly
large number of packages to having a confusingly large number of
classes, each containing one or two packages. This will help keyword
searches, perhaps, but will be actively detrimental to people trying to
get an overview of available packages.
> > p.E. package managers not knowing what your "Licence:" Field is will not
> > provide this way of selecting Packages to their users.
>
> why not? that's why you have defined set of types. user can query by
> any type, the package system does not have to be specifically aware of
> it. Also, user can see the list of all types, again, package system does
> not have to be aware of them - it's just data.
I think he was objecting to the implementation as separate fields in
the control file; you could perhaps allow the user to select on a
specially-defined control field, but that requires that they know the
field name ahead of time. (ick)
Also, you should be aware that my experiments with loading control
fields other than those that apt knows about (and hence caches) have
yielded very poor performance on low-end systems.
Daniel
--
/-------------------- Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> -------------------\
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